The rugged miners sing words taken from actual miners’ songs, set to rhythmically fractured music, enlivened with accordion and cow bells. Some exciting stretches, conducted with crackling energy and color by Grant Gershon, certainly convey the teeming wildness, racial animosity and lawless violence that roiled the West. But her story gets lost amid what comes across as a bold attempt to write the great California opera - a sweeping tale of the mad quest for fortune that was the mostly disastrous Gold Rush. The historical Dame Shirley was a fascinating woman with a pioneering spirit. Sellars’s patched-together approach doesn’t work as well for “Girls,” a work that cavalierly invites comparisons with Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” (“The Girl of the West”), an Italian’s take on the Gold Rush. Though the results had awkward aspects, that opera maintained a strong narrative impetus: Its plot was driven by a countdown to the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Sellars also assembled a libretto from poetry, journals and original documents. Sellars, which had its premiere here in 2005, Mr. Most of Ned’s words come from the journals of fugitive slaves.įor “Doctor Atomic,” the previous collaboration between Mr. When Ned (the charismatic young bass-baritone Davóne Tines) first appears, he describes himself in the third person: “Ned Peters was a hustler from Independence town,” Mr. “Not dainty, simpering kid-gloved weaklings, but muscular, stalwart, dauntless young braves.” (The words come from Mark Twain’s “Roughing It.”)
McKinny sings lustily over skittish, pointillist music in the orchestra. “It was a driving, vigorous, restless population,” Mr. The opera opens with Clarence, a hearty miner (the exuberant bass-baritone Ryan McKinny), who sets up the story almost as if giving a lecture.
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